“James Overman”: Joyce Reading Nietzsche

Abstract

Although Nietzsche is long regarded as a prophet of and precursor to Modernism, if not also Post Modernism, his impact on Joyce—the archetypal High Modernist author—has been mostly, but not entirely, neglected. With some exceptions, Joyce criticism seems content to have progressed little beyond David Thatcher’s claim, in a survey of Nietzsche’s impact on English-language writers, that Joyce “went through a period of temporary infatuation with Nietzsche which left no mark of any consequence on his creative work.”¹ This relative lack of comparative consideration is odd since Joyce’s greatest ability as a writer is his fluency in a wide range of styles and Nietzsche is the preeminent philosopher of style and perspectivism. As Nietzsche wrote in a somewhat ironically boastful manner in Ecce Homo, “I have many stylistic possibilities—the most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man” (EH, 265). Whilst writing Ulysses, Joyce made a similar boast when he described his task as “of writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellow tradesmen” (LI, 167). Indeed, Joyce’s career as a writer could be well described by the rubric “the most multifarious art of style.” From the naturalism of Dubliners to the free indirect discourse of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the radical stylistic, modal, and linguistic shifts in Ulysses and (even more so) Finnegans Wake, Joyce expands and refines the stylistic possibilities of representing multiple individual perspectives.² Already in the earliest-written stories of Dubliners, Joyce modulates style to the individual temperaments represented. With A Portrait he expands this stylistic variability into a sophisticated form of free indirect discourse and with Ulysses takes this a step (or two) further. The absence of quotation marks—or “perverted commas” (LIII, 99) as Joyce styled them—and discursive markers, such as the phrase “he said,” are signs of Joyce’s confidence in his being able to differentiate characters purely on the basis of their own individuating and identificative patois, as well as of his faith in his readers’ interpretive prowess.³ And in the Babelian (or, rather, post-Babelian) Finnegans Wake stylistic pluralization expands across multiple languages. Even early works such as Chamber Music can be seen to lie within this trajectory of refining styles: Seamus Heaney approvingly cites Yeats’s comment to Joyce that his early poems are “the work of a man ‘who is practicing his instrument, taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops.’”⁴

Ethics and æsthetics are one.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, §6.421